The Tulip Read online

  History is often interpreted through the laws and the wars that helped to shape it. The greater part of the book that follows is concerned with the history of a flower, but a flower that has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual and cultural baggage than any other on earth. For centuries, it has invaded people’s lives, demanding – and getting – attention both in the Ottoman Empire and in most of the countries of Europe. Under the Stuarts for instance, England witnessed two civil wars, a regicide, a republic, a restoration, and a revolution in breathless succession. But what was the gardener and staunch Royalist, Sir Thomas Hanmer (1612–1678) of Bettisfield in Flintshire doing during this time? With one hand he was levying 200 supporters of the King to help him defend his patch in north Wales. With the other he was sending tulips to John Lambert (1619–1683), one of Cromwell’s generals. Lambert, like Hanmer, a besotted tulip fancier, lived at Wimbledon Manor, where he had a renowned garden. Hanmer sent him ‘a very great mother-root of Agate Hanmer’, one of his best tulips, ‘grideline [a greyish-purple], deep scarlet and pure white, commonly well parted, striped, agated and excellently placed, abiding constant to the last, with the bottom and stamens blue’.

  Throughout the cataclysmic events of the seventeenth century, the comings and goings of kings and protectors, the Gunpowder Plot, the Plague, the Great Fire of London, the tulip reigned, untoppled, on its flowery throne. It was the most sought after, most precious plant of the seventeenth-century garden, the flower of the age, and like the age, intensely dramatic, prone to sudden change. This was not just in Britain. The tulip ruled all Europe, holding sway in the gardens of the Prince Bishops at Würzburg, Bavaria, and at Nymphenburg, Bavaria, the summer residence of the Electors; in the parterres at Schönbrunn, the Hapsburg palace in Vienna; in the Mirabelle Gardens originally built for Archbishop Dietrich outside the city walls of Salzburg; at Saint Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine in France where the Duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV, employed the painter Nicolas Robert (1614–1685), to record his fabulous collection of tulips, variously described as burinées, fouettées and pennachées. Robert painted a striking, parti-coloured Parrot tulip of red, green and yellow; several red tulips, including the ‘Jaspée de Haarlem’, flared and streaked with yellow; elegant pale creamy-white tulips, touched at the edges of their petals with pink, and a deep-pink tulip, perhaps a forerunner of the modern Lily-flowered types, pinched in very tightly at the waist and flaring out at the top, the petals tipped and streaked with green. Many of Gaston d’Orléans’ treasures had been supplied by the Paris nurseryman, Pierre Morin, who had customers all over Europe.

  From the late sixteenth century onwards, tulips, too, provided a map of the movements of the many people persecuted for their religious beliefs. Bulbs were valuable and they were eminently portable for refugee travellers. Like messages written in invisible ink, tulips emerged slowly in the new grounds that Flemish and French refugees were forced to seek in the wake of Philip II’s Catholic crusades. In the second half of the sixteenth century, these Protestant Huguenots most probably brought the tulip into England from Flanders, for, long before the Dutch cornered the market, Flanders was the most important centre of tulip breeding in Europe. Many of the immigrants were weavers and some settled in Norwich, at that stage the third most important city in Britain. Others, such as the Flemish botanist Matthias de l’Obel (1538–1616), settled round Lime Street in the City of London. A second wave of French Huguenots, including Maximilien François Misson, arrived in England in the 1680s, escaping persecution by Louis XIV, and furthered a massive explosion of tulip growing in England between 1680 and 1710. Huguenot refugees brought the tulip into Ireland too, where the Dublin Florists’ Society was founded in 1746 by Colonel Chenevix, Captain Corneille and Captain Desbrisay, officers in the Huguenot regiments that had fought for Prince William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne.

  A thin, tenuous line marked the advance of the tulip to the New World, where it was unknown in the wild. The first Dutch colonies had been established in New Netherland by the Dutch West India Company in 1624 and Adriaen van der Donck, who had settled in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) in 1642, described the European flowers that bravely colonised the settlers’ gardens. They were the flowers of Dutch still lifes: crown imperials, snakeshead fritillaries, roses, carnations, and of course tulips.4 They flourished in Pennsylvania too, where in 1698, William Penn received a report of John Tateham’s ‘Great and Stately Palace’, its garden full of tulips. By 1760, Boston newspapers were advertising fifty different kinds of mixed tulip ‘roots’. But the length of the journey between Europe and America created many difficulties. Thomas Hancock, an English settler, wrote thanking his nurseryman for the ‘Plumb Tree and Tulip Roots you were pleased to make me a Present off, which are very acceptable to me’. But he had changed his tune by the following year when, on 24 June 1737, he wrote that ‘The garden seeds and Flower seeds which you sold Mr Wilks for me and Charged me £16 4s 2d Sterling were not worth one farthing… The Tulip Roots you were pleased to make a present off to me are all Dead as well.’

  Tulips arrived in Holland, Michigan with a later wave of early nineteenth-century Dutch immigrants, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, persecuted by King Willem I. Under their leader, the Rev. van Raalte, they quickly colonised the plains of Michigan, establishing, together with the many other Dutch settlements, such as the one at Pella, Iowa, a regular demand for European plants. The demand was bravely met by a new kind of tulip entrepreneur, the travelling salesman. The Dutchman, Hendrick van der Schoot, spent six months in 1849 travelling through the US taking orders for tulip bulbs. On 29 August he began the return journey to Holland, setting sail in the windjammer Serapis. ‘The ship rolls violently from side to side,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘High seas ahead – terrifying northwesterly winds – seas that reach to the heavens.’ He finally landed on 5 October 1849 at Hellevoetsluis, near Rotterdam, his order book intact.

  While tulip bulbs were travelling from Europe to the States to satisfy the nostalgic longings of the first settlers, both English and Dutch, American plants were travelling in the opposite direction, often through the agency of John Bartram (1699–1777) who had established an important nursery and collecting point for American plants at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia. The new enthusiasm in England for American plants such as the red oak, the ‘great laurel’ (Rhododendron maximum), sugar maples and the beautiful Stewartia malacodendron was one of the reasons tulips dropped out of fashion in the gardens of the rich and famous. At this time too, there was a great change in gardening taste, which set the landscape style of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) above the flower-filled parterres of the preceding age. The tulip in England was generally considered a French rather than a Dutch flower. As a result, it suffered in the rejection of all things French that followed the outbreak of the Seven Years War in the middle of the eighteenth century. For all these reasons, the tulip lost its glamorous place in the most stylish gardens of England.

  It was rescued from the dung heap by a completely different class of grower, men such as the Rev. William Wood (1745–1808), a Unitarian minister at the Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, Tom Storer of Derby, railwayman and tulip maniac, who, lacking any garden, grew his tulips along Derbyshire’s railway embankments, John Slater (c1799–1883) of Cheetham Hill, Manchester, who bred the supremely elegant feathered red and white tulip ‘Julia Farnese’ and Sam Barlow (1825–1893), whose life as apprentice, manager and finally proprietor of the Stakehill Bleach Works at Castleton could have provided the entire plot of an Arnold Bennett novel. They would have all described themselves as ‘florists’, using the word in its original, seventeenth-century sense; men who devoted themselves, singlemindedly, to the culture of a particular flower, who developed it by their own breeding to conform to a tightly laid-down set of rules, and who showed it in sometimes viciously contested competitions. Saddlers, glaziers, barbers and weavers were members of the Norwich Florists’ Society in the 1750s. Shoemakers se
emed to predominate in the Wakefield Tulip Society, founded in 1835.

  The tulip, along with the auricula and the ranunculus was one of the six flowers cultivated as florists’ flowers and in the careful, patient hands of the florists, the tulip reached its apogee. Hanmer and his like had bought their tulips at great expense, usually from European nurserymen. The florists, lacking the means to do that, grew their own tulips from seed, waiting seven years for a flowering bulb to develop from the initial sowing. Gradually, three clearly delineated groups of tulips emerged from the florists’ breeding programmes: ‘Bizarres’ which showed red or dark purplish-brown markings on a yellow ground, ‘Roses’ which were white tulips feathered and flamed with pink or red and ‘Bybloemens’, white flowers marked with mauve, purple or black. The types had existed before, but the constraints of competitive showing put clearer markers between the groups and gave a little firm ground for judges to stand on. Frequent barbs in the Midland Florist and Gossip from the Garden, magazines founded specifically to cater to the needs of the florists, make it clear that judging was a dangerous pastime.

  The uncompromising search for perfection in the English florists’ tulip produced elegant beauties such as ‘Miss Fanny Kemble’, a Bybloemen with purple, almost black markings etched around the edges of the petals. The tulip had been raised in the 1820s by a Dulwich florist, William Clark (c1763–1831), praised in his obituary as ‘an honourable and upright man’. Purity was an obsession with tulip fanciers and both the base and the filaments of ‘Miss Fanny Kemble’ were extremely white and pure. It produced the famous ‘stud’ tulip ‘Polyphemus’ raised in 1826 by another southern grower, Lawrence of Hampton. ‘Polly’ as it was more familiarly called by the Lancashire growers who finally got their hands on it, was a Bizarre, highly rated for the pale lemon ground colour of the petals, against which the dark markings, feathers and flames, showed up dramatically.

  Of the hundreds of tulip societies that once existed, only the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society in Yorkshire now remains. Its dedicated members represent the last of the long line of amateur florists who have played such an important part in the development of the flower. In the petals of the exquisite, rare tulips still exhibited in competition each year by the Wakefield florists, runs the blood of flowers first grown by John Evelyn and John Rea in the middle of the seventeenth century.

  English florists, though, were no less compromising than Turkish ones. In Turkey, tulips were such an obsession that an entire historical period, spanning the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730) has been labelled the Lale Devri, the ‘Tulip Era’. Three hundred years before the Royal Horticultural Society in England and the Dutch bulbgrowers in the Netherlands got together to prepare the first Classified List of tulip names, Turkish florists-in-chief were already setting up councils to judge new cultivars of tulips and give them official names. Whereas English florists favoured round, wide-petalled tulips, as close to half spheres as possible, the Turks only rated the dagger-shaped tulips made up of needle-pointed petals that feature so prominently in the decorative arts of the Ottoman period. T. acuminata was the species name given to this spidery, mad tulip, its tall, thin bud opening to creamy flowers, sometimes streaked and flecked with red. But although it is given species status, it is unknown in the wild, either in Turkey or elsewhere.

  Fourteen different species of tulip can be found growing wild in Turkey, but probably only four of them, including the brilliant red T. armena and T. julia are truly indigenous. The rest may have been introduced from similar habitats further east and became naturalised, particularly along old trade routes. Not long ago, I was in Eastern Turkey with my husband and two friends, looking for T. armena and T. julia in the areas around Erzerum, Hosap and Van, where the lake gleamed turquoise under mountains still covered in snow. It was May, and we ricocheted along roads and through snow-drifts that would have tested the toughest four-wheel-drive vehicle. We had a small, hired Renault saloon, but against all the odds, it survived, and carried us deep into the bare hills and rocky screes where pockets of bright red tulips grew among small geraniums and eremurus just coming up into flower.

  T. armena or T. julia? It was a question we debated endlessly with almost every colony of red tulips we found. They seemed indifferent to the rules of nomenclature set down by taxonomists. On the road between Aşkale and Tercan, for instance, we came across an isolated group of tulips, with at least two dozen flowers in full bloom. Not one of them could be twinned with another. If you found two flowers that seemed the same, you would soon discover that their leaves were different. If sets of leaves seemed similar, then the flowers cocked a snook at you as they flaunted yellow feathering on their red petals, or showed that they could do without their black basal blotches altogether. We excavated one bulb and, before reburying it, established that it, at least, must have been T. armena, for it did not have much wool under its tunic. T. julia has a very woolly coat.5

  The loveliest colonies of tulips we found were in a valley above Tortum, north of Erzerum where groups of T. armena grew in little pockets between the limestone crags. We always found something intriguing there, sometimes a draba, sometimes an iris, once a wolf. That day, I was spreadeagled with my eyes closed, on a flat piece of rock in the sun. The T. julia/T. armena conundrum was rolling round my head like a riddle. I opened my eyes – who knows why – to find a wolf silhouetted against the sun. It sat upright, facing me on a neighbouring rock, its tail neatly curled around its front legs. Only inches from my eyes were the tulips, brilliant red blazes in the foreground. Behind them was the wolf, stark against the sky. When I sat up, it bolted away, disappearing into a low cave under a neighbouring rock crag. The conjunction of the two was as enigmatic in its way as the saints had been in Crete. As I lay on in the sun above Tortum, I thought still of these tulips, slashes of brilliant blood welling from the bare, brown, shale-strewn slopes of the mountain. Wolves were nothing to them. Saints were nothing to them. Millennia had passed by on this slope, while the tulip, wild as the wolf, slowly, joyously had evolved and regenerated itself. Even now, in their dark underground grottoes beneath the rocks, the tulips were plotting new feats, re-inventing themselves in ways that we could never dream of.

  Chapter I

  A Flower of the East

  Buried deep in the make-up of the flamboyant, cultivated tulips that fill flower shops in spring, must be the ghostly genes of their wild cousins. Garden tulips did not leap, fully formed onto the horticultural scene. They can only have been bred from, or selected from the species scattered through Central Asia and the Caucasus. And a malleable species, such as T. schrenkii, is likely to have been a more useful building block than a species, such as T. butkovii, which shows relatively little variation in the wild. T. schrenkii grows in the steppes and semi-desert areas of the Crimea, the Lower Don, in the Caucasus and Kurdistan. Its narrow buds open into cup-shaped flowers that may be claret-red, or perhaps yellow, pink, or white. Sometimes different colours merge imperceptibly in the same flower, the red drifting into pink so subtly that no ordinary eye could ever distinguish where the one colour began and the other ended. The fusion between the two is cloaked and softened by the glaucous bloom that covers the backs of so many of the wild species tulips. Or is it perhaps the spectre of T. praecox that haunts the flowers produced now in tens of millions by the tulip growers of the Netherlands? T. praecox is an altogether bigger, beefier thing than the elegant T. schrenkii. It has thick, stout stems topped by orangey-red flowers. The inner petals are shorter and narrower than the pointed outer ones, and they are flamed with yellow up the midribs. It was first described (in 1811) by the Italian botanist Michele Tenore from flowers that he had found growing around Bologna in northern Italy. It is known in other places in southern Europe too: Provence, the Languedoc, the Rhône valley. But was it always here? Or was it, as seems more likely, since none of the early, busy botanisers of Europe wrote about it, brought here by travellers and traders from places further east? Turkey perhaps, or
even Iraq. In Turkey this particular tulip was well known enough to have acquired the common name kaba lale. Or is T. praecox perhaps not a true species at all, but the result of some early tulip lover’s interest in improving the strains of wild flowers that he found growing about him? In genetic terms, the majority of wild tulips are diploids, with twentyfour chromosomes marching in harmony. But scientific investigation in the 1920s demonstrated that T. praecox is a triploid, with thirty-six chromosomes. Polyploidy of this kind is often a clue that, in nature’s time scale at least, the plant is a relatively recent arrival. The one form arises out of the other.

  The questions cannot be answered because the tulip, more than any other flowering bulb, continually slips out from under the careful parameters laid down by botanists and taxonomists. The taxonomist’s job is to pin labels on plants, each bearing a description that will enable anyone, from China to Czechoslovakia, to recognise how and why it is different from other members of its family. Often, taxonomists work from dried specimens, pressed and preserved on the dark, dusty shelves of a herbarium. But anyone who has seen tulips growing in the wild, notes the extraordinary diversity of flowers, even in a single colony of what must be a single species. Flowers of the Central Asian species T. borszczowii, for instance, growing along the banks of the Syr-Dar’ya river near Tashkent may be yellow, orange or vermilion. T. armena, widely spread in Turkey and northwest Iran, would be described by a taxonomist as a medium-sized, bright red tulip with a rather small black blotch at the base of its petals. But a group growing on the side of the road between Aşkale and Tercan, in eastern Turkey, includes flowers that are striped with yellow on the red ground. Some that are all red have no basal blotches at all. What is a taxonomist to do with such an unruly genus? The splitters among them elevated variants to the rank of yet more species. A strong-growing yellow form of T. armena found in the Transcaucasus and the mountains of Armenia was christened T. mucronata. A pale yellow form, tinged with olive on the backs of its petals became T. galatica. Another yellow-flowered type growing around Amasya in northern Anatolia, with a bluish, rather than a blackish blotch at its base, was dubbed T. lutea by the Bohemian botanist and engineer Josef Freyn (1845–1903).